How Outplacement Helps Maintain Your Reputation and Brand

Layoffs are stressful for everyone involved, but their impacts on workers are the hardest. Such situations typically unleash negative emotions such as anger, anxiety, and feelings of insecurity about providing for their families and getting another job in the future. For your company, one serious aspect of a layoff is the potential damage to its brand reputation: depending on how offboarding goes, it can be perceived as cold, insensitive, and greedy.

When you include outplacement services in your laid-off employees’ severance packages, you’ll ensure your employees are treated fairly and respectfully, which helps to preserve your brand’s respectability. In this article, we’ll see in detail how outplacement can maintain your reputation and brand and how to include it in your HR strategy.

When you include outplacement services in your laid-off employees’ severance packages, you’re sending the message that you support and care about both them and your remaining staff, in case layoffs happen again in the future. Your company will show that it “walks the walk” regarding corporate culture, standing by human values and treating individuals respectfully. This helps preserve your organization’s reputation and brand internally and externally.

You must remember that when layoffs occur, your company’s reputation will be at risk right off the bat. Such events impact people’s lives severely, whatever their cause or scale, and emotions can run high among dismissed employees, surviving staff, and the external community.

Also, social media and other online platforms like LinkedIn or Glassdoor, where users rate employers, can amplify those feelings and generate a wave of negative repercussions. If those things happen, it can create the perfect storm that seriously damages your brand reputation.

As HR, you should plan your layoff well and include outplacement services in the severance package. Moreover, make sure you partner with the right outplacement firm – a company in touch with the latest tech and employment trends and with vast experience supporting global clients. Take Careerminds, for example: our clients score 16.5% higher than average on Glassdoor reviews.

When your company provides outplacement for laid-off employees, it reassures the remaining staff that they’re in the right place. They can trust that your organization will be there for them even in the most challenging moments, treating them not as cold numbers but as human beings. The result is that your company’s internal reputation gets stronger.

After a layoff, it’s natural for the surviving staff to be anxious and disoriented. All kinds of questions come to mind – people will start wondering if the company is going under, if they’re next in line for dismissal, and what their next career steps should be. This combination will almost certainly result in a morale downturn, potentially hurting the company’s image internally.

On the other hand, if you include outplacement services in severance packages, the impression this approach will likely have on the remaining employees will preserve your brand reputation. It will not only allow you to make difficult decisions with greater peace of mind, but also increase retention and productivity as your staff feel more confident about their position.

Having outplacement as a permanent element in your offboarding strategy – and not only resorting to it when a layoff is about to happen – can be seen by potential and existing employees as an HR benefit similar to group insurance or RRSP. Explaining what outplacement is during onboarding or the hiring process can be a differentiator, attracting and retaining talent by sending the message that your organization puts people first.

You won’t see this approach in most organizations. Companies view outplacement as something to consider only in the event of a layoff, running after providers when it’s already in the works. However, today’s business world is increasingly dynamic, with financial downturns and industry shifts happening in the blink of an eye and demanding swift course corrections. So, if you don’t have an outplacement plan, people will be left without jobs or a plan for the future.

Additionally, many of today’s workers have the power to choose the company they’ll be working for. In this case, HR shouldn’t brush off outplacement as some kind of taboo subject, since it’s one more offering on the table to ensure the employee’s future success. They can either choose to work for you or another company. Again, it’s proof that yours is a people-first organization. So, think about having an outplacement firm on retainer (like Careerminds, which charges no retainer fees).

Still thinking about how outplacement helps to maintain your reputation and brand? First, remember that there are a few ways to look at it. It can be seen as a benefit (framed like group insurance or a pension plan), as part of your corporate culture (as proof that your company values individuals), and as a strategic tool to give employees the confidence they need to stay happy and productive.

Externally, outplacement can also reassure your laid-off employees that you treated them the best you could, given the circumstances. This element will potentially avoid negative posts or reviews of your company on LinkedIn or Glassdoor. 

Workers are more conscious than ever about joining people-first organizations. They’ll ditch companies that have old-fashioned policies for dealing with workforce reductions or employee offboarding – and if that’s your situation, you’ll have a hard time attracting and retaining talent. Trusting a modern outplacement provider like Careerminds will help you to maintain your reputation by empowering employees in their professional journeys, wherever they are.

Rafael Spuldar

Rafael is a content writer, editor, and strategist with over 20 years of experience working with digital media, marketing agencies, and Tech companies. He started his career as a journalist: his past jobs included some of the world's most renowned media organizations, such as the BBC and Thomson Reuters. After shifting into content marketing, he specialized in B2B content, mainly in the Tech and SaaS industries. In this field, Rafael could leverage his previously acquired skills (as an interviewer, fact-checker, and copy editor) to create compelling, valuable, and performing content pieces for various companies. Rafael is into cinema, music, literature, food, wine, and sports (mainly soccer, tennis, and NBA).